Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Reader (not the Oscar nominated Movie)

Reading RSS News feeds daily is a habit of mine that I like. The feeds vary from BBC News & technology to gaming & blogs. But I don’t spend too much time in them coz I’ll usually feel sleepy after an hour of reading. I rarely spend more than an hour at a stretch. But today, I believe I read the longest article I’ve ever read in my life. It was 31 pages long & was about SSD technology. Computers always fascinate me & the latest in computer tech is something that I try to keep in touch with. But this article was different. Though it was a technical article, it seemed to have a soul.

The article in question here is ‘The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ’ by Anand Lal Shimpi in the famous www.anandtech.com. SSD is the latest technology in Hard Disk Drives. In lay-man’s language, you could say, it is flash drive technology used to create hard disks. If you are a passionate 24x7 PC user like me, then your primary hardware related concern about your system would be your hard drive. It has all your data but it is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode, sending all your precious data to oblivion. If you are skeptical about the last statement, then ask me about my 250GB drive that stopped working a week ago with almost 240GB of data (including some files that I use on a daily basis) in it.

Fear not, as SSD technology is here to the rescue. SSD is not only more reliable, but also much faster. Not just an increase in speed to help you play the high-end computer games, but an increase in speed that you’ll notice in your daily life. It radically improves everything from the OS boot speed to application start speeds & multitasking. It doesn’t make noise, it is cooler than our normal HDD & has no moving parts inside it. The only flip side is probably that the technology is in its infant stages & so, it comes with high price. But this is one technology that I’m really looking forward to.

Now, if that last paragraph seemed interesting to you, then you definitely should go read that article. I’ve always believed in knowing the history behind things that affect our daily lives. History of the world like the World War and the discovery of America are taught in our school history books. But what isn’t taught is the history of internet. Don’t tell me that they teach about Tim and ARPANET, coz I’m talking about the actual history of how internet grew from being a geek’s world to a common man’s world, how every company tried to claim internet as their own & how the dotcom bubble actually burst. This is the history that happened in the past decade. This is what we should know to understand what is happening right now in this world.

The article by Anand is a mix of both the history behind SSD and the technical understanding of the technology for a lay-user. This is probably what gives the article, its soul. The article not only introduces you to the technology, it gives the background of the creation of the technology, it explains the current stance of the technology & explains what you can expect from the technology in the near future. I will confess that I didn’t read every word of the article coz I skipped some technical benchmarks & stuff that didn’t interest me. But I did read the most of that article which I didn’t realize until the end that it had taken me around one and a half hours.

1 comment:

  1. Nice post.:) .. i ll also try me engaged in reading :)

    ReplyDelete

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